The Thing It Landed OnChapter 9 of 145 min
Before you are anybody
Theo wakes at ten past six, a few minutes before the alarm, which he usually does.
For a short while there is nothing much. The grey at the edge of the curtain. The boiler. A car going down the hill in second gear. He is awake and he is not thinking about anything, and if you asked him afterwards how long it lasted he would say a few seconds and he would be guessing, because nobody was counting.
Then the Tuesday arrives.
And it arrives in a particular order, which is the subject of this chapter. First into the room is a man called Gavin and a conversation that has not happened yet and may not happen at all.
Theo did not choose Gavin to go first.
Everybody has this, every day, free.
The sequence is the same for almost everyone. There is the waking. Then a stretch — a few seconds, sometimes the better part of a minute — in which you are entirely awake and nothing in particular. Then the day loads, and by the time your feet are on the floor you are a parent, an employee, a person with a thing on Thursday, somebody's son, and the one who should have rung the plumber.
In that stretch you were awake and you were not anybody.
It is the same thing the drive was, two chapters ago, except that the drive is occasional and this happens three hundred and sixty-five times a year whether you take any interest in it or not.
The order tells you something
Here is the use of it, and it is a measurement rather than an exercise.
Whatever comes into the room first is where most of you is standing.
It is not the thing you love most, and it is not the thing that matters most if anybody could measure such a thing. The first arrival is simply the heaviest — the one with the most of you invested in it — and it has the strongest claim on a mind that is not yet defended.
Gavin is not the most important thing in Theo's life. Theo has a daughter and a brother he is worried about and a knee that will need doing. Gavin is a man he has a slightly difficult working relationship with, and Gavin arrives first, every morning, for weeks at a time.
There is nothing to be ashamed of in that, and no judgement of Theo in it. It is just the reading. You could learn more about a person from a fortnight of their first thoughts than from an hour of asking them what matters to them, and the two lists would not resemble each other at all.
About the phone
I am not going to tell you to put it in another room, because you have been told that by better people than me and you did not do it.
But it is worth seeing clearly what it actually is at that hour. A phone at six in the morning is a machine for telling you who you are to several hundred people before you have had water.
Every notification is a position being handed back to you — you are the one who has not replied, the one who was mentioned, the one who is behind. It loads the whole wardrobe at once, in about four seconds, and it does it before the day has made any demands of its own.
That is not a sin. It is just a very fast way to close the only door in the day that opens by itself.
What to do, which is nearly nothing
Do not try to extend it. You cannot, and attempting to produce a longer gap is a person trying to produce a longer gap, which is the position we met in chapter seven and it shuts the thing immediately.
Do not fill it with a practice. This chapter is not an instruction to meditate at six in the morning. If you already do, carry on; this is about something else. If you do not, acquiring a dawn routine on the strength of chapter nine of a paperback is a reliable way to be disappointed in yourself by the second week.
There is only one thing, and it is subtraction.
Do not close it deliberately. That is all. If you wake and there is a stretch, let it be the length it is. Do not reach for anything for as long as nothing needs reaching for. You will often reach anyway; the reaching is not a failure and there is no scoring.
And once in a while — not every day, not as a discipline — notice what came first.
If your mornings are not like this
Some people wake already braced. If you are in grief, or frightened of something specific, or ill, the morning is not a quiet doorway; it is the hour in which the day arrives by reminding you, every single time, and the few seconds before it are not peace but the cruellest part, because they are followed by remembering.
If that is this year for you, skip this chapter. I mean that plainly. It is not the important one, it is no kind of step you have to pass, and the thirty seconds in the last chapter work perfectly well at any hour of the day, in any state, including that one.
Come back to it when the mornings are ordinary again. They usually are, eventually, and nobody ever believes that at the time.
This week
One morning. Not all of them.
Before you move, see what is already in the room with you.
Give it one short phrase — Gavin. The money. Thursday. — and then get up and have the day, and do nothing whatever with the information.
It will still be there next week, and the week after, and that repetition is the whole of what this chapter had to offer: the same name, arriving first, for a month, until one morning it does not.
Within about a fortnight you will start seeing all of this in other people. That is the next chapter, and it is more dangerous than it sounds.